200 MPs Demand Strong Guarantees in Vienna

Date: 05 April 2022 - 22:01

News ID: ۱۰۱۳۰۱

TEHRAN – Nearly 200 lawmakers on Tuesday asked the Iranian administration to push for stronger guarantees in Vienna talks on the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal, insisting that the country’s red lines must be observed in the negotiations.
The lawmakers signed a letter, urging President Ebrahim Raisi to ensure that the parties involved in the Vienna talks give Iran stronger guarantees.
The Vienna talks, meant to resurrect the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, were paused in March despite reports suggesting that they were in the “final stages”.
The United States, which is blamed for the current stalemate, is reluctant to take confidence-building measures due to its erroneous bias, procrastination in decision-making and excessive demands, Iranian officials say.
They have repeatedly said the U.S. needs to remove all illegal sanctions against the Islamic Republic in a verifiable manner and offer guarantees that a new U.S. administration will not breach the JCPOA again before it can rejoin the deal.
Former U.S. president Donald Trump unilaterally left the JCPOA in May 2018 and reimposed the anti-Iran sanctions that the deal had lifted. He also placed additional sanctions on Iran under other pretexts not related to the nuclear case as part of his “maximum pressure” campaign.
Iran is going to release a strategic comprehensive document on its nuclear industry, a government spokesperson said Tuesday.
Speaking at a press conference here, Ali Bahadori Jahromi unveiled plans to celebrate the National Nuclear Technology Day which falls on April 9.
During the event, to be hosted by the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and attended by President Ebrahim Raisi, the “comprehensive strategic document on development of the nuclear industry” will be unveiled, he added.
In recent years, Iranian scientists have made remarkable progress in the field of peaceful nuclear technology despite the sanctions imposed by the West.
It will be the 16th year Iran will celebrate a national day to mark its achievements in the nuclear industry.
Over the last few weeks, diplomats have shifted from saying the revival of the Iran nuclear deal was coming in a matter of days to admitting it was entirely uncertain whether it would go through at all. Negotiations in Vienna began nearly a year ago.
Iran had demanded that the United States formally state that future U.S. governments will abide by the deal, but that request was summarily denied. Former Vice President Mike Pence has said a revived deal would be ripped apart by Republicans

if and when they return to the White House. Iran, however, has reportedly been put at ease by an apparent agreement that would allow it to avoid completely destroying its advanced centrifuges (although it’s not yet clear whether Iran would merely disconnect these centrifuges or dismantle them and send them to a third country for safekeeping).

Tehran is also demanding that it wouldn’t budge until the United States agreed to remove the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) from the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list.

Last week the United States imposed fresh sanctions on entities linked to Iran’s ballistic missile program to assuage the concerns of its allies. Moreover, both U.S. special envoy for Iran Robert Malley and Secretary of State Antony Blinken emphasized that, regardless of the IRGC’s terrorist designation, the United States will still treat it as an illegitimate entity and that a range of sanctions will remain on the force that hinder it from doing business abroad.

The force has indeed been slapped with all kinds of sanctions since 2007 that block American businesses and banks from engaging with the IRGC and affiliated entities. The IRGC was added to the FTO list only in 2019 under Trump’s maximum pressure campaign, but that has had a limited effect on the IRGC’s abilities.